I have been blessed with a very common name, which does not facilitate research.
With a less common name one can often assume that people bearing the same name in a given region are related to one another. This would be a very dangerous assumption for people bearing my name. Almost every village had its carpenter(s) – and for many of them Timmerman(s), Temmerman a.s.o. became the family name without any blood link between the various families.
The name is particularly frequent in Vlaams Brabant, Antwerpen and Limburg as well as in the southern part of the Netherlands.
Keynes said that in the long term we're all dead. Of course, in the long term we're all related too - in my links I have added a couple of sites on that subject. But in the historical period that most of us can document (up to the 16th - 17th century) we like to know who our direct forebears were.
Genealogy helps us to find them, but also helps us to understand that all mankind is one very big family. If only we could behave accordingly.
Spreading of family names in Belgium : http://www.familienamen.be/.
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